Posted
by
Soulskill
on Monday September 13, 2010 @02:54PM
from the implausibly-impolite dept.

IllogicalStudent writes with this excerpt from The Vancouver Sun:
"The Harper government has tightened the muzzle on federal scientists, going so far as to control when and what they can say about floods at the end of the last ice age. Natural Resources Canada scientists were told this spring they need 'pre-approval' from Minister Christian Paradis' office to speak with journalists. Their 'media lines' also need ministerial approval, say documents obtained by Postmedia News through access-to-information legislation. The documents say the 'new' rules went into force in March and reveal how they apply not only to contentious issues, including the oilsands, but benign subjects such as floods that occurred 13,000 years ago. They also give a glimpse of how Canadians are being cut off from scientists whose work is financed by taxpayers, critics say, and is often of significant public interest — be it about fish stocks, genetically modified crops or mercury pollution in the Athabasca River."

When Government starts restricting information it means they are hiding something.

My only guess is that some of the Canadian Federal scientists have discovered things about climate and the oil sands that the Canadian Government is terrified of releasing. It's obviously a conspiracy among the Canadian big shots.

The Canadian people should demand all of their resignations and get a new PM in there pronto before what's ever going on the we don't know about happens and destroys Canada and possibly the World!

The core of the problem is that the conservative party currently in government is insanely partisan. Their entire MO is about "message management," with actual governing coming in a distant second or third. So of course they are going to try to muzzle scientists, and the actual research they are muzzling doesn't even need to make sense - it's done more as a Pavlovian reflex without taking the time to analyze whether the information is even sensitive or not.

The hypocrisy of it all is astounding considering this same party campaigned on the promise of "transparency and accountability" during the 2006 election.

I don't see the difficulty. We now know "Transparency" = "keeping the scientists invisible" (you can't get much more transparent than that) and "accountability" = "having bean-pushers really run the country".

I'm Canadian by the way and I'm really ashamed and pissed off by my government...

First of all, the Conservative Party of Canada is much more like the former Reform Party than the Conservative Party of the old days. There is a very strong base of religious nuts and redneck in the party who would do anything to deny actual scientific fact about too many things. Be it of religious reasons when it comes certain topics like geology/archeology/astronomy etc.

Canadians voted for Harper and he is simply giving them what they asked for. Everybody knows scientists just take money from the government by ginning up fear and give us nothing tangible in return. It's time somebody stood up to them.

Yup, that's basically the conservative talking point: scientists are just a bunch of academic elitists, and we don't need facts or research to tell us what Canadians - deep down inside - really know to be true.

They criticize the Chinese about freedom of the press and then do everything they can to prevent truth escaping into the wild in Canada. Unfortunately by trying to hide the truth they highlight that this is good area to look for whatever they are trying to hide. Which highlights another Conservative trait, they aren't very bright.

I don't know where you live. Around here its pretty much the opposite. They start off in school believing in "authority" without any consideration about where that authority comes from (most 5 years olds don't care what political party is in power).

By the time they start hitting high school (mid-teens), they're usually anti-authority of any kind, but still without much consideration.. they just want to do whatever they feel like and think they should have that freedom.

Once they start hitting their early to mid 20s (especially if they go to college/university where actually thinking about things is encouraged), they start putting some real thought into why they like (or dislike) what they do. They actually are able to vote so they start actually considering what they're voting for (as much as the propaganda allows.. we're all well aware that what the parties say they'll do often gets ignored or even 180'd).

By the time they've hit their 30s they've pretty much figured out where they lie on the political spectrum. Sure they'll differ slightly from year to year, but short of some massive bullocks on the part of their chosen party (such as the liberal scandal that got Harper elected in the first place), its pretty rare for people to do much of a party swap beyond a certain age.. they've already become set in their ways.. and they've got real responsibilities (work, family) and less time to think about their choices, and so on.

Obviously I'm generalizing and I'm sure there's loads of counter-examples but that's sort of a general flow of things.

They're corporate anarchists like every other libertarian. No amount of government is ever small enough. Especially when it's reduced to military and police, the usual "reasonable libertarian" utopia, where the rest of the government that can keep those forces from being nothing but private armies/security is missing.

What about Noam Chomsky, Philippe Van Parijs, Mike Gravel ect?. Left-Libertarian is not an oxymoron.Sure I find the far-Left Libertarian Communism and mutualism a bit hard to follow, but Georgism and Geolibertarianism have a fairly consistent center-Left ideology.

Some libertarians are anti-corporation too. They fear centralization of power either in government or quasi-governments (large corporations) as dangerous to individuals.

I believe you, but I have to note that very few people who self-identify as libertarians bother to talk about this issue. It's pretty much "all government-is-bad, all the time." A little more acknowledgement that Big Anything is bad -- Big Government to be sure, but also Big Business and Big Religion -- and that playing the various Bigs off against each other can make things go a lot more smoothly for the rest of us, might do a lot to help the LP broaden its base.

Libertarians are all just wannabe mayors of Sim City, so there's no actual reality to what would be an acceptable final result to a libertarian. There is no end to "less government" except "no government". Which is anarchy, which is always a brief period before it's replaced by warlords. That's why a lot of libertarians will tell you the acceptable amount of government would be "military and police only", because they're really just authoritarians. But "military and police only" is just a way to skip right

They criticize the Chinese about freedom of the press and then do everything they can to prevent truth escaping into the wild in Canada.

Forget that, they ran on a platform of transparency. Hell, one of their primary talking points was that the Liberals were corrupt and secretive. And then we see this bullshit. Gotta love the hypocrisy...

Same shit here in the US. Bush ran a very secretive government, and pulled the "We don't have to justify it to you," card to the other two branches often. Obama promised to change that... And really hasn't. The states secrets thing is getting pulled out, few changes are being made, etc.

Politicians don't like it when their opponents have secrets, but they love it when they do.

That's not really the same thing. Bush scared the crap out of a substantial number of Americans. I'm not sure that McCain or anybody else would've been able to do anything else. Regardless of what he does he's screwed. If he fixes all of it then he loses the independent vote that's necessary to keep his party in power and if he doesn't he gets idiot conservatives claiming that he's as bad as his predecessor.

But at the end of the day, Bush fucked things up to the point where there isn't really any good way of fixing a lot of this. If he doesn't keep it secret, it's just going to embolden the terrorists, and if he does he's going to face well justified criticism for being secretive.

I can't blame him for playing it safe a terrorist attack now would keep the Presidency out of democratic hands for a long time.

The question is: When does it become safe to say things again? When terrorists no longer target the United States? That could be a very long time indeed and at that point people may be accustomed to a government that operates on a "need to know" policy.

The question is: When does it become safe to say things again? When terrorists no longer target the United States? That could be a very long time indeed and at that point people may be accustomed to a government that operates on a "need to know" policy.

In terms of actual danger, terrorism in the US is at the bottom of the list, and it certainly does not justify the decrease in Govt. transparency (almost nothing would) that has occurred. I mean even here in New Zealand we got our own terrorism act, and exactly how much domestic terrorism have we had? None. It's just an excuse to make life easier for the Police and the Intelligence service, at the expense of justice.

I'm advising a friend who is running for office (city council in a smallish town) and she's been hit with a lot of questions about what her platform is, whereas she's really a pragamatic problem solver with a great record of listening to people and using the best factual information available to fix stuff.

I told her to reply to questions about her platform by saying, "Platforms are what politicians say before they're elected, and we know how that works out. The Harper government ran on a platform of greater transparency. So I'm not going to make you any grand promises, except to say that I'll listen to the voices of my constituents and do my best to find practical, affordable, sustainable solutions to their problems."

The number one issue in the district where she's running--based on talking to the people there door-to-door--is quality of roads and sidewalks, which are not mentioned in anyone's platform.

The whole media circus of political platforms is old and tired and will hopefully be dead soon. We've all seen how it ends far too often. Time to stop listening to politicians lies and start asking them, "Why should we think you're going to respresent us rather than your party after we vote for you?"

Scientists very rarely drive out dissenting views. Science is based on the idea that if a theory is any good, the bulk of it will survive being stress-tested and the bits that do fail needed replacing anyway. When practiced in this fashion, the good views will get stronger. Maybe a mistaken belief is accepted for a while (such as the aether), but eventually the more correct theory will become strong enough that it will supplant all others. Eliminate the weakest links and replace them with links as strong as the remainder.

True, sometimes you do get fanaticism. The Anti-Global Warming scientists (none of whom are climatologists or environmental chemists) demonstrate fanaticism over and above the tried-and-tested method outlined above. They do not test their own beliefs to the breaking point, nor are they concerned with establishing whether global warming is indeed the stronger theory or not. Such people drive themselves out. Science is not the people, nor is it the end result, science is the method. The method is all that matters, nothing else. If you renounce that method, you have stepped from science to religion, regardless of what you say, because that is how these terms are defined.

I spent much of my youth - including 2 different highschools - in Canada and it has to be one of the most government controlled propaganda using places ever - honestly you would think that they single handedly won WW2, that the bush pilot is a significant figure in world history and *everything* was invented in Canada.

It's not propaganda. Canadian schools simply have a strong focus on Canadian content, especially because most Canadians are bombarded with American culture/news/history on a daily basis. If we didn't give a shit about the things we've done ourselves as a country, we may as well just roll over and officially become the 51st state.

It's not propaganda because it's purpose is to inform, not persuade. OP was using hyperbole. And anyways, every other country in the world teaches it's children about the history of their home country first and foremost. So why should Canada be any different?

Hitler's propaganda was written for the express purpose of harming the Jewish people. That is what defines it as propaganda - persuasion of some set of facts (real or imagined) about Jews. Historical fact is not normally considered propaganda because it typically does not contain a persuasive argument. This is a case of "all propaganda is information but not all information is propaganda".

Now one can argue endlessly about what constitutes propaganda and what doesn't, but generally those

Hitler's propaganda was written for the express purpose of harming the Jewish people

Not if you consider that Hitler believed all of his falsehoods to be true. Then, he was just informing the German people about the truth behind the Jews, and propaganda was his method. All propaganda consists of is presenting facts (again, real or imagined) while harboring a bias.

Oh, and of course there's going to be a Godwin strike or two. It's a discussion invoking propaganda.

Having lived and gone to school in both the US and Canada, I have to call complete BS on this. I've also worked for the Canadian government in and around historical monuments and sites and it is nothing like what your trying to declare. Canada always declares that "the Allies" not "Canada" helped win WW2, that the Bush plane (not pilot...) [wikipedia.org] while is a well known plane is not the be all end all of anything in history, nor do they declare "everything" was invented in Canada. While in the US though, I found that things like the Vietnam war are altered and edited (my history text books enter listing of that war was "The US entered Vietnam, fought the rebels, then the war protests happened, and then in the 80s..." completely removing any mentioning of the end of the Vietnam war, the removal of troops, the fact that the US lost that war (the teachers aren't to mention this)). The US also always wants to declare that WW2 only started after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, and not in 1939 (since the US was supplying both sides with weapons and supplies) and that the US single handedly ended the war. That they are the center of the world, ect...

The U.S. did not lose the Vietnam War. We signed the Paris Peace Accords, withdrew, and then South Vietnam lost to North Vietnam.

More seriously, do you have a cite on the U.S. supplying both sides of WWII between 1939 and 1942 (no, Catch 22 doesn't count)? I've heard this before, but every time I've looked closely, it turns out that the U.S. owned factories in Germany that were the basis for the claim had, in fact, been appropriated by the Germans at gunpoint.

Well, its a fairly well known fact that the US supplied petrol and credit to Franco and the Nationalists in Spain, who were allied with Hitler and Mussolini, who used the opportunity to try out various techniques and new weapons systems, as well as to feel out the state of Soviet technology -- Soviet tanks and armored cars with light artillery having been supplied to the Republic. The Spanish Civil War was basically the dress rehearsal for WWII.

Besides Standard Oil [wikipedia.org], General Motors [wikipedia.org], and of course IBM [amazon.com] (too lazy to bother, see the 2001 book IBM and the Holocaust?

I don't think any US based facilities of GM, and the Seven Sisters from the Standard Oil breakup, were taken by gun point. I also don't know if any US firearm and other weapon manufacturers supplied the Nazi Germany.

I'm not trying to vilify USA during this time period, many countries and companies made some embarrassingly cruel political and economic decisions. Germany was not alone in its anti-Semitism.

I'm not sure about weapons, but there's clear evidence that IBM supplied the Nazis with a sophisticated punch card system to keep track of their prisoners. Clear evidence as in: The punch card records say "International Business Machines" on them, and contracts with the signature of Thomas J Watson Sr.

I was ashamed too when Harper was elected to become the next PM. He keeps doing the same BS that George Bush did a few years ago [ipsnews.net] so much and so often he is known as Mini-Bush for a reason.

Is this control of them being able to speak to the media, or control of what they say once they can speak ?
I suppose that it is probably moot since a scientist who says something that differs from what the govt wants them to say will never get permission to speak again.

This is the same government that has destroyed the accuracy of the Census [theglobeandmail.com] under the smokescreen of "privacy rights." (We all know why the Conservatives don't like accurate census data; it makes it harder to spend money based on ideology rather than on real need.)

The Canadian government has always been notoriously non-transparent; even the Liberals have muzzled a scientist [wikipedia.org] in the past.

The whole census fiasco was an custom-engineered crisis. Who knows what the hell Harper was trying to accomplish with it, but he likely succeeded. As a bonus for him, it's in the public mind now, so it's a can of worms that can't easily be closed. Even if a new government comes in and tries to undo it, the right wing rabble will still foul the census in protest.

I'm going to call BS on this one. The story is pretty straight forward -- ~200,000 citizens did not fill out the long form of the census during the last approach. According to the current laws, this was punishable by substantial fines and mandatory imprisonment. The census bureau *never* pursue these fines or penalties. On the basis that a) the law was never enforced, and b) a strong libertarian minority within their supporters were railing against oppressive government, they removed the law.

While all the complaints around the accuracy of the data, the importance of the census, are valid.... this is still about simplifying the reach and authority of government -- something the slashdot community normally endorses. Had this been about liberalisation of pot laws, or eliminating government enforcement of copyright, etc... we've be hailing them as heros.

My parents are retired scientists of world-class standing, previously employed by the Canadian federal government, with extensive networks of colleagues around the world as well as here in Canada. The current government's efforts to muzzle and control what scientists say is widely viewed as completely unacceptable by the scientists themselves, but the highest levels of the departments which employ them have long been taken over by bureacrats.

I would not be concerned with bias toward government goals on the part of the scientists, though. The government's attempts to vet and spin their public communications speaks quite eloquently to the scientists' integrity... and to this government's perfidy.

It's obviously a cover-up of climate change data, ordered by lobbyists for the planet-raping carbon industry. Those other restricted topics are only there to make the climate change cover-up a bit less flagrant.

Harper, in his attempts to create a "Fox News" in Canada blasts those opposed to it using "Free Speech" arguments.

Harper is a hypocritical creep who has NO interest in the good of the people. He is interested in dumbing them down, propagandizing at them and limiting knowledge.

Propaganda is not an attempt to communicate. Rather, it regards people not as people but as little machines which can be programmed using the right strings of words and images calculated to illicit desired behavior. The moment somebody intends to manipulate, the act of communication has ended and the act of programming has begun. Freedom of speech laws were designed with the idea in mind that people fundamentally respected the humanness of their peers. They didn't have to respect one another's opinions, but the underlying assumption is that we are appealing to the soul and intelligence on a personal level and not a cynical machine-programming level. Put another way, humans must treat each other as humans and not as lab rats.

Propaganda doesn't respect fundamental humanity and therefore should not be brought under the protection of freedom of speech. Same with advertising.

This isn't just Canada by any stretch - it's everywhere. And scientists are just the newest people being affected.

The problem is media. Not left-wing media, not right-wing media, but scandal happy media. From my perspective (in Canada), media have lost all desire to fill people in on what's happening, all they want is a scandal - something they can sell right now. They want to catch a politician (or a scientist) making a mistake or saying anything that a significant number of people will disagree with. And it's been getting worse for decades.

Now, sure, it makes sense that - to a certain extent - the media needs to maintain a bit of an adversarial role toward government. Media is an important check on the power of government. But that needs to be balanced by a desire to be informative rather than sensational and a desire to inform people with both sides of an issue.

How it is now, we've reached the point that, to be safe, politicians just don't say anything of any interest - and the only information we'll get will be vacuous and committee-written. Nobody wins in this situation.

To me, politicians and media share the blame on this one. Politicians need to be open, but media needs to ease off the trigger a bit so that being open isn't quite so suicidal. The best summary I've seen of this is here [youtube.com] (David Mitchell).

What I read it as is that you will never hear anything from a government scientist that doesn't support the government agenda. It means that government scientists cannot realistically be treated as unbiased sources, the same way you wouldn't trust a tobacco funded study on the effects of cigarets. Would you really trust a government funded scientist's on the possible ecological damage caused by harvesting the oil sands if the current government's agenda had that as item number one? Most people would question that relationship anyway, but this new requirement makes it all but official; if you take government grant money, you will only publish results that agree with the government's stances.

Scientists have been prevented from considering certain possibilities, and researching in various directions. Given that speaking out on something as trivial as a 13,000 year old flood took days, I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that papers that didn't support the Government's position on more contentious issues have been suppressed.

Actually, if you listen to the comments of some DFO (Department of Fisheries and Oceans) scientists when asked about their thoughts on the (many years) raging 'controversy' over whether or not sea lice and other contaminants have been (drastically) affecting salmon runs their answers (or lack thereof) seem to make it pretty clear that they're not allowed to even think about the answers to those questions.

A few weeks ago, the Canadian Government decided that filling out 'long form' census questions would no longer be mandatory. They declared that Stats Canada scientists had assured them that this would not affect the quality of the data collected. The head scientist of Statistics Canada [www.cbc.ca] had to quit his job [www.cbc.ca] in order to counter the lies spoken by the Prime minister and his Cabinet.

Given the kind of control that they've taken over what government scientists can say, I have little question that some political hack is going to declare that submitting a paper to a scientific journal about a contentious issue is going to fall under this new policy.

Personally, I think that this is a flagrant violation of scientists' rights to free speech, but that's a matter for the courts to decide.

There was a study on cell phone use while driving. The study cam to the conclusion that talking on the cell phone while driving was dangerous. It also stated that there was no difference in the danger level if you were holding the phone or using a hands free device. The politicians where I live used this study to pass a law requiring a hands free device to be used.
How stupid are people that the politicians can believe them to be that stupid?

stated that there was no difference in the danger level if you were holding the phone or using a hands free device.

Trouble is, if you open up that can of worms you'll get studies noting there's no difference between hands free phone chatting and talking to passengers, and that kids in the car are much more dangerous than even using a chat client on a smart phone while driving and eventually you'll get the conclusion that drivers should be isolated and on uppers, while passengers should be in a separate compartment.

And that just won't be politically manageable. Which is why you get not entirely scientifically supported regulations instead, that may or may not do much good, but that perhaps make it appear that someone's doing something about something so the can of worms can be shoved under the carpet until we have computer driven cars instead.

you'll get studies noting there's no difference between hands free phone chatting and talking to passengers

Wrong. Talking to passengers is very different than talking on the phone. I can't recall the study off the top of my head, but this has been tested. A passenger is far more likely to take the driver's state into account before speaking, and is also aware of what is going on outside the car. Talking to a person on the other end of a cell phone has none of these advantages.

What has peer review got to do with this? Peer review is to ensure that what does get published is valid, but this story is about what doesn't get published. Nobody peer reviews a paper that is never released.

What has peer review got to do with this? Peer review is to ensure that what does get published is valid, but this story is about what doesn't get published. Nobody peer reviews a paper that is never released.

You're confusing two different issues here. The paper did get published in a peer reviewed journal. The government didn't interfere with that process at all. There is no evidence that the science was influenced by government agenda.

The government didn't step in until after the peer-reviewed paper was published, and only then did they refuse to let their scientists talk with the media. Even then, the media story wasn't suppressed, it went forward, based on information published in the peer-reciewed literature and interviews with co-authors who were not Canadian government employees.

The sum total of the government interference was to prevent their own scientists from talking directly to the media. Which is pretty darn stupid, without a doubt, but it's not the same as the government burying the data.

Well, it is the ridiculous nature of the process and it is another example of the control freak we have as a PM. The example given in the article is a scientist who published a paper in Nature about the glacial flooding at the end of one of the ice age periods. The government did not allow him to be interviewed about the article until the deadlines had passed. The OK had to come virtually from the PM. We are not talking about anything controversial here: nothing that would be tied to present day issues. This pre-historic science and has nothing to do with contrarian views.

This will shock everyone, I know, but it is an example of the hypocrisy of the govt which came to power partly on the platform of being open. Sigh... meet the new boss same as the old boss.

Yup, exactly this. The Harper administration has for the past few years been increasingly exerting control on how the public service disseminates information to the public. In the past (before 2007) a bureaucrat usually only needed the approval of their direct supervisor to respond to media inquiries, unless the topic was particularly sensitive. Now it the system of Message Event Proposals created in 2007, approval frequently needs to come directly from the Prime Minister's Office, even for totally routine and innocuous communications.

I think the biggest problem is, reports on the last ice age might offend the Conservative Party's core supporters - who know that there's no such thing as 13,000 years ago, and even if there was there'd be both dinosaurs and cavemen at the same time.

Thankfully I exaggerate, but that element of Canadian society definitely has it's home in the CPC - look at Stockwell Day, cabinet minister and young earth creationist.

The Conservative base, like it seems to be in many countries, is split between the social conservative religious wackos and the fiscal conservative "yay oil, boo climate" wackos. This move is brilliant (in a very cynical way) because it plays to both - but like most of Cabinet's actions these days, doesn't appeal to anyone else.

Sorry, but that's not really it. The Prime Minister is silencing them because they might talk to the media about things he doesn't want them talking about. It's part of a pattern of hamfisted control freak behaviour. I mean most of the ministers that Harper has appointed aren't allowed to talk to the media without his direct approval of what they're to talk about and when they are allowed, they're given a script to memorize before hand. Only 1 or 2 of his most favoured cronies are allowed the freedom to speak the media without heavy censorship.

What I read it as is that you will never hear anything from a government scientist that doesn't support the government agenda

if the current government's agenda had that as item number one

*CURRENT* being the key word. "The Government" has no agenda. It is a group of people intended to lay down and enforce some common rules; not a dictator. If you can't convince your countrymen that the government is going the wrong direction, and get them to vote it a different way, maybe you are the one in the wrong.

The fundamental problem with this philosophy is that 50% of voters are dumber than average (median).

That's great, so whoever is in charge at the moment gets to decide which results get published. Why, they should fund a study to see which political party's policy will be best for the economy. That way everyone in the country will know for sure which party they should vote for... as long as it happens to be the one in charge, otherwise no one will ever see the results.

How are you supposed to convince others that the people in charge are wrong when the people in charge decide what information is available? You need access to information that shows them to be wrong, something that this law appears on the face to be designed to prevent. We've always been at war with Eastasia, and here's a historian that will corroborate that statement if you don't believe me.

Doubtful, it's part of a patten of tightly controlling information. After all if you were going to dictate what these scientists were allowed to publish, first you would have to make sure they're not allowed to talk about that to the media. Frankly the Conservative Party of Canada is a lot like the Republican party. They've become an anti-fact, anti-truth party that likes to drive wedge issues to convince dumb or apathetic voters to vote against their actual interests over some inflammatory issue of the

All governments share two common agendas, one is to maintain the power of its rule. This is particularly evident in all of the "qualifiers" to what should be basic rights. You have freedom of speech (so long as you don't offend us), freedom from torture (unless you are a "terrorist"), the right to know what you are charged for (unless you are a "terrorist"), etc.

The second agenda is to maintain the basic structure of the political environment. It is not advantageous for the democrats/republicans in the US to introduce an amendment that would bring proportional representation or otherwise disrupt their power balance. Neither side really wants reforms in tax structure, debate over currency, etc.

If the two major parties can distract the masses with issues that don't really matter they can share the power for the future.

If you can't convince your countrymen that the government is going the wrong direction, and get them to vote it a different way, maybe you are the one in the wrong.

Good luck getting most people to even vote, let alone go beyond their general apathy.

And that reasoning is laughable, the main point of freedom in a democracy is limited government first, that is the real pillar of freedom, democracy is second. Democracy without limited government is nothing more than mob justice. Your reasoning falls apart when you try to use it in a case. For example, is lynching justified? After all, everyone agrees with it!

A free government depends on limited government more than it depends on democracy .

You probably don't understand the current situation in Canadian politics. The Harper government got in on 35% of the popular vote, and probably less. How? Four other parties split the left of center vote: the Liberals, the NDP, the Green Party, and the Block Quebecois. Two thirds of the country did not want and did not vote for the Conservatives, and voter apathy is at an all time high.

This story hits right to the crux of the matter. The Conservatives beat the Liberals by campaigning on the issue of--wait for it--transparency! They then immediately proceeded to shut down all avenues of public information from the government except official channels, and Conservative ministers usually refuse to talk to the press at all, sending party spin doctors instead when they can no longer avoid talking to the press. Government access is now funneled entirely through Access to Information, which can take months or years (effectively making it useless to the media), and National Security is invoked on the merest wisp of an excuse. So this story is part of a longstanding practice, not just a reasonable approach to the media.

A month ago, the Conservatives triggered a shit storm by attempting to shut down the long form census, claiming that the questions were intrusive. The question they cited was, "How many beds do you have in your house?" I will explain why this seemed significant to their base in a moment (hint: they equate beds with sex.) The Conservatives claimed they could get the data by other means. This means your bank, credit cards, air miles, browsing habits, etc--all of which have your name attached to the data, are quite expensive, and all of which come with non-disclosure agreements. But the census does not associate names with data (these get separated upon receipt), and gives statistical data on the state of the nation. In other words, it serves as a report card on government policy, and is open source. The other data is spotty, not much good for statistical analysis, not available for public view, but gives the government unprecedented access to personal information. In other words, our government wants more information about us, but doesn't want us to know anything about it.

And yes, they will know how many beds we have, and will have a pretty good idea of what we do in them.

How do they get away with it? The 35% comprises two groups: mainly social conservatives (the religious right and immigrants from third world countries), and "economic conservatives"-- the Canadian equivalent to the Tea Partiers. The former I can understand, but those alone would make the Conservatives a political backwater. The latter are a mystery. The Liberals paid down the debt for fourteen years, and Paul Martin could have steered through the current economic crisis with his eyes closed. We threw away the best economic manager we've ever had on a whim. It isn't like our federal government was out of control--Americans would have killed to have a guy like Martin. The Conservatives are now taking credit for Canada's remarkably stable banking system, yet in their first throne speech, they tried to dismantle it, pressuring the banks into allowing subprime mortgages; forty and even fifty years long. Fortunately, the financial institutions imported from the U.S. to foster this insanity were not yet too big to fail, and collapsed without much of an impact. But what if Harper had gotten power in 2000? We would have conditions that mirrored Bush's America, with huge military expenses in Iraq, a housing bubble, and failing banks. And their pet project? Twenty Billion for prisons, to build an American style prison industry/lobby. Conrad Black (hardly a bleeding heart liberal) has discovered for himself [slashdot.org] the obscenity of this proposal. No one in favour of this has any right to call himself a libertarian. And so, as under the last Conservative government, we have record deficits, a failing economy, and the largest trade deficit in our history.

Er, no. The publication process hasn't been muzzled as far as I know (and I'd probably know, see my comment further down). But this does point to some interesting challenges for the current generation of scientists.

Take a guy like Dave Schindler [wikipedia.org] - when he ran ELA for the feds, he published and publicised ground-breaking work on nutrient loading and acid rain (to cite a couple of examples) that resulted in improved regulation. Today he's not employed by the feds, so he can and does tackle the oil sands issue, but those scientists who are employed by the feds are the ones who are told to vet their public comments.

...if you take government grant money, you will only publish results that agree with the government's stances.

Hang on that is NOT what the article says. The scientists in question are EMPLOYED by the government. They are not university-based faculty who also apply for grants, are employed by a university and have tenured positions. While this is certainly very disturbing and worrying it is not as far reaching as applying to everyone who gets government research grants, only to those employed directly by the government.

Of course the irony is that, since I am someone getting a research grant from the Canadian government, but not employed by them, the government policy might make you doubt that what I just wrote is true.... which is why it is a really stupid policy to muzzle scientists whether they are government employed or not. It makes it hard to believe scientists if they come up with evidence that actually supports a government policy yet everyone will still believe them if they announce evidence against a policy....and so far university scientists can still do that.

Any scientist who doesn't work for the government works for industry. They're even more controlled in what they can say.

No scientist should have to check with the government before talking to the media. The only duty of a scientist is to advance knowledge. To promote truth. If you trust them to do that, you should have no problem with them talking to the media. If you can't trust them to do that, then why are you giving them grants?

It may be different in Canada, but in the US, the professors in the field of education tend to be some of the greatest contributors to the various scientific fields. They generally don't work for the government or the industry.

This rule appears to apply only to scientists who directly work for a government agency as employees, though, not to professors who are funded by federal grant money, or even professors who teach at public universities.

So... have looney Creationists actually gained enough hold on the Canadian government to silence scientific knowledge?

TFA mentions something about oil sands and mercury pollution in the Athabasca river, so it's most probably work of the oil industry.

As a bonus, they get silence about floods at the end of the ice age. Any paper about climate is bad for the oil industry, they need ignorance in order to enforce their truth that there is no climate change and if it existed it would not have been caused by CO2 in the atmosphere.

This is a myth. Humans have known the earth to be round since at least the Greeks. Anyone who has ever been on a ship would have noticed the horizon and land seemingly disappearing over it.

The objections to Columbus was that he was bad at math and could not possibly get all the way to India with his supplies that way. He just got lucky that he ran into the Americas, otherwise he probably would have starved after running out of supplies.

Alas, while the conservatives did a 'Unite the right' and gained votes from the old conservative party and the reform party, the left has become increasingly fragmented. The Liberals, the NDP, the Green party. Even the Pirate party has a Canadian segment now. So if you lean conservative you have little choice. If you lean liberal you have so many choices. Thus the current stead of Canadian parliament.

Canada hasn't been right-wing since the 1920's, even more-so since the '70s(lookin' at you libs). It's always leaned left, the only question is, where is the right and to what point is it leaning. The reality is during the 20's we got the start of institutionalized left-leaning "we care for you" programs. During the 70's this accelerated, with things like CPP and medicalcare. It won't ever shift back, because people are stuck on the tit of government entitlements.